How Do Military Interventions Affect Human Rights Practices?

With a military intervention in Syria on the table, it’s worth considering what the impacts of such interventions are. Over the next few days I’ll be featuring political science research on this topic.

From the abstract of a paper by Dursun Peksen in the September 2012 issue of Political Research Quarterly:

military intervention contributes to the rise of state repression by enhancing the state’s coercive power and encouraging more repressive behavior, especially when it is supportive or neutral toward the target government. Results … show that supportive and neutral interventions increase the likelihood of extrajudicial killing, disappearance, political imprisonment, and torture. Hostile interventions increase only the probability of political imprisonment. The involvement of an intergovernmental organization or a liberal democracy as an intervener is unlikely to make any major difference in the suggested negative impact of intervention.